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Some days, things just don't work out. Or don't work.
Earlier
I wanted to upgrade (their term, not mine) my iMac from Snow Leopard (10.6) to Lion (10.7). I even had the little USB stick version of the installer, to make it easy. But after spending some time attempting the installation, the Lion installer "app" failed, complaining about SMART errors on the disk.

Disk Utility indeed reported there were SMART errors, and that the disk hardware needed to be replaced. An ugly start.

The good news is that in some places, including where I live, Apple will do a house call for service, so I didn't have to haul the computer to an Apple store on public transit.

Thank you Apple.

I called them, scheduled the service for a few days later, and as instructed by Apple (I hardly needed prompting) prepped a backup using Time Machine.

The day before the repairman was to come to give me a new disk, I made sure the system was fully backed up, for security reasons started a complete …

Here is the text of the talk I gave at the Go SF meeting in June, 2012.

This is a personal talk. I do not speak for anyone else on the Go team here, although I want to acknowledge right up front that the team is what made and continues to make Go happen. I'd also like to thank the Go SF organizers for giving me the opportunity to talk to you.

I was asked a few weeks ago, "What was the biggest surprise you encountered rolling out Go?" I knew the answer instantly: Although we expected C++ programmers to see Go as an alternative, instead most Go programmers come from languages like Python and Ruby. Very few come from C++.

We—Ken, Robert and myself—were C++ programmers when we designed a new language to solve the problems that we thought needed to be solved for the kind of software we wrote. It seems almost paradoxical that other C++ programmers don't seem to care.

I'd like to talk today about what prompted us to create Go, and why the result should not have surpris…

Whenever I see code that asks what the native byte order is, it's almost certain the code is either wrong or misguided. And if the native byte order really does matter to the execution of the program, it's almost certain to be dealing with some external software that is either wrong or misguided. If your code contains #ifdef BIG_ENDIAN or the equivalent, you need to unlearn about byte order.
The byte order of the computer doesn't matter much at all except to compiler writers and the like, who fuss over allocation of bytes of memory mapped to register pieces. Chances are you're not a compiler writer, so the computer's byte order shouldn't matter to you one bit.
Notice the phrase "computer's byte order". What does matter is the byte order of a peripheral or encoded data stream, but--and this is the key point--the byte order of the computer doing the processing is irrelevant to the processing of the data itself. If the data stream encodes values wit…